Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 933 posts

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#421

Post by andai »

Avamander wrote: post #388
dandare wrote: post #186

Now think about all the conspiracy theories that actually turned out to be truth. MK ULTRA, Dark Alliance, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, COINTELPRO, PRISM, you name it. Would these be banned ("fact checked") from YouTube, Facebook or Twitter under these new rules? On the other hand, there is a clear evidence that authoritarian regimes (Russia) are weaponizing social media, using troll farms, puppet accounts and fake news,…

> What is the correct solution here, that I don't know. I know, ban what is fundamentally rooted in bullshit. Homeopathy, "all and every vaccine is bad", "these essential oils will cure your cancer", "5G causes corona", "earth is flat". Done, there's no collateral damage, but helluva lot less lying.

Clowncore published a humorous music video titled Earth is Flat but renamed it to Earth because the algorithm can't detect humor, YouTube had un-recommended the original video and put a big info box next to it, insisting that the earth is not flat.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#422

Post by steenreem »

Isn't YouTube banning certain content exactly what free speech is about? YouTube, a corporate entity with its own goals and beliefs, exercises its right to say what it thinks is the truth. It's similar to most newspapers: they're not entirely objective.

If content publishers want to post Corona related information that YouTube thinks is false, they'll just have to find/create another platform for it.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#423

Post by meragrin_ »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #195
owlbynight wrote: post #174

I'll preface this by stating that I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However, were I to happen across someone motionless on the floor with a needle in their arm, I would give them NARCAN instead of a ride to a rehab center. I'm from the United States. Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free sp…

I hate it as well, and if I could come up with some new way of advancing our species aside from free speech I would. I cannot and cannot see how such a thing would ever be possible. Here's a bit of sunshine: the human species has not changed in thousands of years. We're still the same hairless monkeys we were back when people were thinking up all kinds of cool shit. Knowing this, it follows that 10% or so of the popu…

> The problem we have is that social media should not exist.

So you are saying we should just get rid of the internet? Social media is not just a few popular sites. It is the entirety of the internet. You get rid of the "social media" sites and people will still connect. Crap will still flow. You'll obviously see a temporary drop until people adjust and reconnect. The internet is about connecting people and making the exchange of information easier. You cannot get rid of "social media" without getting rid of the internet.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#424

Post by nl »

adventured wrote: post #331
nl wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

45% of US adults think vaccines are unsafe. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-06/aoa-4oa06241...

Wildly misleading statement, especially given the tiny sample size versus hundreds of millions of adults in the US. From that same link (demonstrating Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of vaccines; which is obvious given the high vaccination rates in the US): "While the vast majority (82%) chose in favor of vaccines, 8% selected responses expressing serious doubt. An additional 9% said they were unsure." Also: "I…

None of this disagrees with the link I posted. In fact your own link quotes different research saying:

The poll showed that only 45% of Americans believe vaccines do not cause autism in children.

And as the link noted, measles needs a 95% vaccination rate to be stopped effectively.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#425

Post by pjc50 »

TomSwirly wrote: post #352
pjc50 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we've solved over and over again the problem of what it takes to have a peaceful and progressive society ... have we? Much of the 20th century was spent at war, with a death total somewhere in the region of a hundred million. As were most of the previous centuries. There have been isolated pockets where one might have a lifetime of stability over a wide area, but few of those were also "free". > The problem we have…

Are you honestly claiming that banning paid lies on YouTube leads to Rohingya-style genocide? It's increasingly difficult to have rational conversations with Americans these days, and this idea is certainly a big part of it. It just astonishes me that Americans see little difference between a private company forbidding liars from using their free service, and people being rounded up at gunpoint and being killed.

I am not claiming that. In fact, it's probably necessary to prevent that kind of disaster, and I wish YouTube would ban a bit more aggressively - but also with more thought and better review.

(I seem to have been misunderstood quite badly, a sibling comment to yours makes exactly the opposite allegation! Also, I'm a Brit)

The risk of any ban system is that true-but-inconvenient stuff ends up getting banned as well. The very real risk that video evidence of murders by police might be banned for "promoting violence", for example. There's already the controversy over removing evidence of war crimes in Syria - kind of understandable, given that those must be pretty traumatic videos.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#426

Post by bufferoverflow »

owlbynight wrote: post #329
bufferoverflow wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't hate the idea of censorship. You openly support it.

I don't believe that censorship from a 10,000 foot view is a binary state. You're thinking that I support redaction, I suspect; probably because it's hard to represent my beliefs in a few lines of text. My view is that attempting to convert facts -- delivered by the scientific method -- to fiction by way of purposeful misinformation is a more corrosive form of censorship than showing the door to a comparatively minis…

> My view is that attempting to convert facts -- delivered by the scientific method -- to fiction by way of purposeful misinformation is a more corrosive form of censorship

Then you simply don't know what the word censorship means.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#427

Post by bufferoverflow »

hef19898 wrote: post #354
bufferoverflow wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "these videos" though? How do you determine which ones are misinformation, when WHO was demonstrably wrong at least 3 times in this pandemic? What's your source of infallible truth?

And how often did the WHO insist that their stance, in any of these three cases which you didn't name, was correct after it turned out to be not the case?

They never redacted some of it.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#428

Post by 72deluxe »

jpttsn wrote: post #358
noahtallen wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is to censor untrue and dangerous ideas rather than unpopular ideas. Yes, determining that is challenging. But denying COVID, for example, is very dangerous to all of society. Thousands of people are dying because of COVID deniers. To me, this is theoretically similar as if a massive video campaign was messaging you to drink bleach. I’m sure that sort of video is against YouTube’s terms of service —…

> But with a great production value, paid influencers, just the right wording and messaging, you can manipulate social networks into spreading very dangerous information and actually making people believe things that can kill them. Clearly, you’d need an arbiter that is immune to such influences. Someone who knows what’s really true and can sensor the misinformation despite its high production values. I think the int…

Someone not human then I guess??

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#429

Post by hef19898 »

wolco2 wrote: post #159
rudedogg wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was so disappointing to watch happen. It was obvious (even at the time) that it was to keep people from hoarding masks so they were available for healthcare workers. Fauci, the Surgeon General, and everyone else should have refused to lie. Now the damage is done, and more people distrust Science.

It happened in many countries around the world at all levels of government. History has shown that blindly following uber global bodies like the WHO can have a massive negative outcomes even with best intentions.

The first global body was the League of Nations, if you exclude entities like the British Empire from the perspective of their colonies.

When exactly did following the UN or any other body result in desaster?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#430

Post by TeMPOraL »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #224
owlbynight wrote: post #174

I'll preface this by stating that I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However, were I to happen across someone motionless on the floor with a needle in their arm, I would give them NARCAN instead of a ride to a rehab center. I'm from the United States. Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free sp…

> ...what YouTube is doing here is a slippery slope and it's scary... BTW, "slippery slope" was intended to be an example of fallacious thinking. Before it became a popular term, it was intended as a criticism of arguments of the form, "A will lead to B will lead to C, so A is bad." I'm not bringing this up (just) to be pedantic; the overwhelming evidence to date is that it is extraordinarily difficult to get any of…

The slippery slope is a fallacy only if the slope isn't, in fact, slippery.
Post reply on HN